Last Hope
by Aurumite
Summary: Lyon is dead, Eirika leaves Renais to marry, and Ephraim is alone.


Before Ephraim leaves Lyon's body, he cuts off a lock of his hair.

He doesn't know why. He's taken quite enough from his old friend with the dirty blade of his spear, and he's not particularly sentimental. But he braids it carefully so that none of the strands will be lost, and he takes it back to Renais with him. He keeps it in the drawer of his bedside table and sometimes in the years that pass he takes it out before he drifts to sleep, just to— he's never quite sure what.

He never shows Eirika, though he knows he could. She often joins him at his bedside in the weeks just after, when night terrors send her running to check his pulse. He dreams the same bloody dreams, but he stays in bed, catching his breath, in case she's already on her way. It's better for him to be anchored there, able to reach for Lyon's hair. Sometimes he thinks it might comfort Eirika too, to have a bit of him back, to light a candle to see it by and remind herself of the exact shade it was in Grado Keep's dark library, but the words to explain its existence never come.

He holds it like a lifeline, like a talisman, and it makes him uneasy because it feels like a black magic of its own. But the alternative of getting rid of it seems impossible. He's sinned beyond number and he should not be allowed to throw the weight of it away. Besides, he thinks one night as he twirls the pale locks around his fingers, he doesn't want to. This is all he has left.

* * *

Eirika makes a few visits to Caer Pelyn, after the war. Ephraim is very careful not to ask about them.

He wants the coming talk to thunder upon him like a rider with a lance, something he can react to on the spot. He wants his reflexes to carry him through. But that night five years later, when Eirika knocks on his bedchamber door, he realizes it had been walking alongside him for as long as he can remember, like an old friend. He can't fight it. He can't run from it. And the thought is terrifying but he invites her in, watches her shut the door behind her before she sits on the arm of the chair he's occupying.

We are stable, he thinks to the surface of his cluttered desk, beneath him. Renais has been healing, through efforts he can't call tireless and plenty of Eirika's help. His many, many trips to Grado to organize earthquake relief and fill the hole in the government have yielded results: Knoll and Duessel are working to implement a meritocracy. He wonders if Lyon would be pleased.

During those trips he always finds himself drawn to the library, as if by an unnamed magic. His boots clomp and echo no matter how softly he tries to walk, but when he speaks, as if Lyon can hear him, the walls of browned pages absorb the sound. He doesn't say much; a bit of nothing here, a single question there. Sometimes the memories plague him so terribly that he wonders why he comes. He can nearly feel the warmth from the study table again, in the exact spot Lyon would fall asleep. The musty smell makes him recall the curve of his smile, the sound of his laugh as they struggled to be quiet when their tutor expected them to be concentrating.

It was so much time for Lyon to spend with someone he hated, like Eirika wasn't enough for him. He must have been so, so desperately lonely.

Ephraim brings himself back to the moment. The paperwork. His sister.

"He asked for my hand," Eirika says quietly.

"No surprise there. It's about time, really."

Ephraim stands. He paces to the fireplace, leans an arm on the mantle, and stares into the bright movement like he can transfer his anxiety there, to writhe elsewhere.

"You told him yes, I'm sure?" he asks.

"Of course I did. I love him."

"Good," Ephraim says distractedly. "Good. Saleh is a good man. I'm very happy for you. And you have my blessing, of course."

"That's not why I'm here."

He knows. He's known for a long time. He takes a deep breath to loosen how his muscles have locked, but can't relax his throat enough to speak.

"Myrrh shouldn't be left alone," she continues. "And I can't ask him to leave his grandmother. He can't come to Renais."

"Of course not," Ephraim says, sincerely. "No, you should go to him."

"But the idea is upsetting to you."

"It's not," he insists. "But you came in here so timidly, as if it's this awful, weighty matter, and...we should be celebrating, Eirika. It's joyous news."

"And I feel joyous," she retorts in the same tone. "But I can't realize it fully."

He turns to look at her and finds her watching him.

"I don't want to go," she says, "if it will make you unhappy."

"Certainly not. I'll be worried for you, that's all. It's quite far, and you don't know many people there..."

"I've visited many times," she reminds him, "and have met several friends."

"It's colder out there, too."

"Ephraim."

He turns back and fiddles with an ornament on his mantle: a little wooden spearman from his boyhood.

"You've never been without me for any great deal of time," he says finally. "Won't that be difficult for you?"

The reverse is true too, of course. Eirika, in her gentleness, does not mention it.

"I imagine it will be very difficult indeed. But I will have Saleh with me. Ephraim...the last thing that I want to do is leave you alone."

"Don't worry about me," he says firmly. "I want this for you. More than anything."

"Are you sure?" She rises and she's still looking at him and her eyes are like the ocean, an omniscient blue, touching every rocky corner of every shore and smoothing them. He can't meet them but he means it when he nods. He feels her gaze continue to wash over him. She wants proof.

"I'm sure," he says, though he's the ocean now too, the same as her in all things, and his feelings are tide-like and impossible to catch and keep. "I know you'll be safe there, and I want that. And happy, and I want _that_. And you're going to have children with him, right? You've always wanted children. I even want— I want to see you as a mother." Everything grows colder and slower as he struggles to go deeper. "We never had a mother. I want you to know what it's like."

They'd both become good at taking lives, but Eirika— only she can _make_ them. She can create, heal, repent. She could start anew. She crosses the distance between them, touches his sleeve.

"I'll visit often," she says, and he finally looks at her. Her eyebrows slant up. The least she could do is make a clean cut, he thinks, but he forms the smile he knows she likes.

"I look forward to it," he replies.

* * *

An old daydream comes to him. He's climbed to Lyon's balcony, legs and fingers shaking from the adrenaline, from the cold wind threatening to blow him from the mossy castle-side. Sliding over the railing is even easier than mounting a horse. Lyon is awake, of course, soft hair tumbling forward as he reads by a single candle. When he catches sight of Ephraim he makes his favourite face, the one that's breathlessly impressed with him: lips parted, pupils dilated.

 _I've packed a compass and canteen and my bow for hunting. Eirika said she would cover for us. Let's run, Lyon. And if the adventure is good, we don't have to come back._

He comes to the present. Grado's library is still. Surrounded by these hundreds of books, he wonders for the first time which Lyon might be reading, in that old fantasy. He'd never cared enough about the details—about him—to bother imagining it.

"It's not a possibility anymore," he says to the air.

* * *

Eirika writes him twice a week without fail, sometimes even thrice. He's never so meticulous, nor is his penmanship so neat, nor are his letters so long, but he hopes she still understands that his hasty script slants from eagerness to be written, that he takes the time to print her entire name as a token of affection: the E the same, the I, the R, the A, but everything else her own.

It isn't long before she's describing her wedding dress to him, and he teasingly replies that she ought to just send a sketch, knowing very well that she can't draw.

There's a strange tightness in his gut when he thinks about her coming marriage, and it takes him a few days to realize why. He's worried about who will walk her down the aisle and keep a handkerchief in case she tears up and toast to her health in front of her guests. Father is gone. Ephraim is supposed to do it. And he knows that Eirika can walk herself, but— but he'd wanted to be there, at her side one last time, just in case. Just so she had the option. For the first of what he suspects will be many times, Renais is keeping them apart.

He makes sure to write her a quick note, he lets his advisers send her a suitable present, and he tries his best not to think about it any more than that.

Her next letter arrives with a swatch of white lace in the envelope. Rather than sending him extra fabric, she'd cut it from her own dress after the festivities. Beneath her high-spirited letter is a sketch after all, by a skillful hand.

She's looking up at him from the paper. There's a fire in her eyes that he's never seen before, though he's been at her side through her greatest furies and her deepest hurts. Saleh must have drawn it, he realizes. The dress she wears suits her, though it's far simpler than he would have guessed: no embroidery, no pearls, simply the lace, and hanging loose around her rather than cinched at the waist. Saleh manages to give her the dip of one anyway, and the curve of a hip as she sits to pose for him, and Ephraim smirks at the bias because he knows the truth, knows that in actuality Eirika is a shrill, skinny little girl with extremely pointy elbows, and her hair frizzes, and she fits in a prince's clothes as well as he does.

* * *

He keeps the lace with him constantly. When he has to think about a difficult issue he reaches for his pocket and rubs it with his thumb. After a few months he's worn it into a stringy spiderweb, but he keeps it just in case. He brings the too-beautiful drawing with him to Grado, the next time he must go, and unfolds it against a table in the library.

"Is this how you saw her?"

His voice isn't bitter now, only curious and tired. He receives no answer.

* * *

Months pass. The winter didn't feel as cold as he remembered winter being, nor the summer as hot. In the autumn Eirika tells him she's with child.

He's being nagged to marry in the meantime. His council is trying to arrange for L'Arachel to visit but Ephraim keeps throwing up excuses: _No, we have the delegates from Carcino that week, No, I want to meet with Joshua within that month, No, I will be in Grado at that time._ Tana writes him a letter every moonturn, always to inquire about his health, but he rarely remembers to reply.

Now that he's missed Eirika's and is staring down the shaft at his own, weddings only put the taste of blood back in his mouth. He bounces his knee through his meetings and looks out the window, over the hunting grounds, wondering what would happen if he scaled down and rode beneath the forest's canopy.

Eventually Eirika is complaining about how big she is in all her letters, and Ephraim's fidgeting grows so bad that it distracts the people sitting next to him. He wonders if she's carrying two. If that would kill her like it killed their mother. (Not for the first time, he speculates on which of them is the extra. Is it possible that he was this sort of murderer even before he was born? And if so, did killing make him feel so triumphant even then?)

He's made a plan to visit them long before his next letter arrives, this time from Saleh, with Myrrh's mark scrawled alongside his signature. The words on the parchment are formal but sincere and invite him to visit anytime he likes, for as long as he wishes. He writes back at once with a solid date, pressed hard with his pen like that will make it a promise. He arranges with his council and Seth to have his absence covered. He packs a bag, unpacks it, repacks it, and keeps it for days by his door. He wants to be able to grab it when it's time without wasting a second.

And then, the night before he's supposed to leave, Duessel and a few diplomats arrive from Grado. They're carrying drafts for war reparations, now that they've recovered from their disaster. It isn't something Ephraim can postpone.

"We can't just entertain them for a few days?" he asks anyway, in the late meeting he's called his council and his knights to, while his guests are being fed in the hall below. The itching deep inside his chest is so intense that he wants to run laps around the room. "Eirika is expecting me. I can't disappoint her like this. I'll ride as hard as I can to cut the time. I'll even leave Caer Pelyn a few days early."

"Her Majesty understands that your duties to the realm must come first," an adviser tells him.

"I already missed her wedding. My own sister's wedding."

He can't sit still a second longer. He's pacing before he can remind himself that it's not kingly.

"She understands that too, surely."

"I haven't seen her in a year."

"I know it is a weighty burden, but Your Majesty must put Renais's welfare before his personal feelings."

The words are spoken gently, even sympathetically, but the tight knot in Ephraim's chest snaps nonetheless. It bursts into something bright and hot and awful and he's striding around the long table and toward the man, snapping that while he sat here on his arse he couldn't know, he couldn't _dream_ of what Ephraim has done for Renais's welfare. Filling his palms with innocent blood, casting salt over Grado's fields, shouldering Eirika's broken sobs, taking threats and insults and attempts on his life, putting down his own knights like dogs, all for _Renais_ , and if _Lyon_ —

A voice calls him from the doorway, impartial but sharp and cold as his namesake. Ephraim cuts himself off. He's shaking. The whole room is staring at him, the whole room save Kyle, who is looking at the door. He follows his gaze and blinks at Seth, an impressive dark figure in the frame.

"King Ephraim. Please follow me. Something urgent requires your attention."

He disappears and Ephraim follows, more to escape than because he's willing to obey. His mouth is open to ask what could have come up nowwhen Seth clamps a hand on his shoulder and forces his back smoothly against the wall.

"Sire," he says, dangerously quiet, and in one single word he demands an explanation.

"I couldn't help it." Even his voice comes out quivering. He doesn't try to pull free but his hands fist again at his sides. "He's so _ignorant_."

"You panicked in there."

"I know."

"You have been trained against this."

"I know," he repeats, more hoarsely. "It won't happen again."

Seth's face softens, if only slightly. He withdraws his hand. Ephraim stays pressed to the wall.

"Such things are not uncommon, after so many battles," Seth says. "You should speak of this with Forde and Kyle, and try to remain in the present. I will write to my lady, if you desire it, and summon her to visit instead."

Ephraim is already shaking his head against the implication that this is something spiraling out of his control, and shakes harder at the mention of Eirika. "She shouldn't be traveling; she's due soon."

"It's for the best, then. When you finally visit you'll have a nephew or niece to visit as well."

"I wanted to see her before." Though he's slowly calming in the silence of the corridor, his hands are still trembling and he clenches them harder to stop it. "What if something happens? And I'm not there?"

"My lord," Seth says, very softly. "You can not protect her from it. You must realize that."

His fingers go slack. Despite the advice just given to him, he can only think of Father slain in the throne room, Myrrh begging him to keep watch as she slept, Kyle and Forde betrayed by their superior, the wasted body on his spear. He feels the panic rise in his throat again like he is about to retch it out. He needs to get to his rooms, get into the bedtable drawer, tether himself.

"I have to go," he says abruptly, but Seth grabs his shoulder again before he can bolt.

"You have to return to that meeting room and apologize to your loyal subject, whom you shouted at out of turn."

"I will. But there's something I need first. In my rooms."

"I'll fetch it for you. What is it?"

Ephraim feels like a child, like he did when he was first growing into manhood, when Seth had just reached it and towered over him, when sparring him meant getting thrown hard into the fence around the ring.

 _All I have_ , he wants to say, but the words are too pathetic and stay weighted in his stomach. What rises instead is a whispered "I can't" and he repeats it until it's a desperate chant, until the fear he's beating back has crashed over him like a wave. Seth braces him until he can again.

In the end, Seth offers to write the disappointing news to Eirika, and Ephraim assents. He enters the meeting room again with a crooked smile, a tinge of true nervousness and a great deal of faked confidence in the curve of it.

"Perhaps you can tell that it's been a while since I've had a drink."

There's a faint, collective chuckle. Forde mutters "Or a lay" just loud enough to be heard and the room slices itself over its blade of tension, erupting into honest laughter. With a grateful glance at his knight, Ephraim apologizes to the advisor he'd yelled at. Sincerity is one of his rare gifts and he's forgiven at once, with an equally sincere wave of a hand.

The room is his again. He takes a deep breath and ventures back into business.

* * *

He ends up accompanying Duessel back to Grado, to check on things. He keeps his mouth shut about the poor timing. It proves to be a good idea when Duessel confesses en route that he hadn't announced his visit because he feared Ephraim would not want to discuss the war again, if given the chance. But Grado still owed her due, and Duessel was determined to pay the debt.

Ephraim respects Seth truly, deeply, but in that moment he's glad it had been him in the hallway, instead of the Obsidian. He can't bear the thought of Duessel watching him crack.

The humiliation of it is almost too much to take, as he enters Grado's library alone. Pride forces his jaw taut.

 _You did this to me,_ he thinks fiercely. _She could have never set foot in Caer Pelyn, I could still be the prince, if it weren't for you. If only you'd taken the gods-damned throne._

Ephraim would have helped him. After all that tutoring, all those nights up until dawn together, he would have given Lyon any reassurance he needed. Father would have guided him like a son of his own. Eirika might even have wed him, if the way she cried out when he collapsed at Ephraim's feet was any indication.

But no, of course Lyon couldn't have called on him, because Ephraim's too thick to ask for advice, too insensitive to help with political delicacies, too stupid for things like tax laws and trade routes. He was loathed. And he should tell Lyon the truth:

 _I hated you too, by the end._

He wants to speak the words. They sit upon his tongue like broken glass and leave it sliced and stinging. He has to spit them out. He has to.

But he can't manage it. He swallows the poison and he leaves.

* * *

It's another few months before Eirika's visit, but this time, it's Ephraim's decision.

There's deep sympathy in her reply to Seth's letter. She apologizes for his burdens. She vows to come as soon as she's able to travel, and Ephraim replies with an immediate no.

 _Don't you dare rush. Rest and come when you're all ready. There's no hurry._

He can handle things. If not for his own sake, he knows he can do it for theirs.

When she finally does give him a date, he tries not to think about it. It won't do to get worked up and be disappointed again. He works so hard at it that he feels something like disbelief when he's called to the gate.

He spots Saleh dismounting first and has to shake his head; he's not simply Saleh any longer but Eirika's husband— not even that, he realizes, but his brother-in-law. He looks well, or at least as well as a new father can, and he offers Ephraim a smile and a short bow before he reaches up to help someone else out of his saddle. She can't get down herself, for all her skill with horses, because of what she's holding.

Eirika's more beautiful than he remembers, more beautiful than even the drawing Saleh gifted him with. Motherhood's cut a healthy, alert flush into her cheekbones, brought a softness to the proud angle of her chin, painted tenderness along the lines of her eyes. Her hair is still long and piled high, her gown loose and free. But most beautiful of all is the child balancing easily on her hip, as if she and her mother have been practicing their delicate act for thousands of years.

"It's good to see you," Eirika says, and Ephraim knows he doesn't have to say anything at all. She smiles and looks down at her daughter.

"Nada," she says to her, "this is your uncle."

The girl is too young to talk, but she looks at him, and Ephraim has to blink hard because her round blue eyes aren't Eirika's but Father's. Eirika laughs at the expression he must be making and pushes her hip forward, easing back her arm in invitation: he can take her.

But he can't, though he reaches his hands out. He's never held a child this small. Her little fist is smaller than a fig, her ringlets as wispy as down on a duckling. She's cuddled bonelessly against her mother. If Renais were attacked again, right that second, he was sure she could be killed from the violence of the sight alone, before any of it even touched her. Saleh is smiling something knowing over Eirika's shoulder, and Ephraim thinks he understands- but he can't, not fully.

"It's all right," Eirika coaxes.

"No. I'll break her."

"You're not that strong."

He never thought he'd be so relieved to hear those words. Eirika lifts the girl with an easy trust, the sort they'd always shared, and shows him how to hold her against his shoulder. She raises her head at once to study him. He studies back. She's even lighter than he expected, and much warmer. Her wild hair is her father's but the colour is Eirika's. He wonders if any of himself showed up in her, somehow. He opens his mouth, though he's unsure of what to say to the blinking, breathing thing in his arms.

"I am going to give you everything in this world," is what comes out. "Even the things your mother says you can't have."

"Ephraim."

" _Especially_ the things your mother says you can't have."

Saleh laughs at that, which makes Eirika laugh again, which makes Nada laugh, all of them an unbroken chain. And that's when Ephraim sees it.

 _Smile, Ephraim. Like you used to._

He doesn't hear the words as often as he used to, yet he still can't muster his old smile, not even for Eirika, not even for his new niece, no matter how hard he tries. But it's all right, he realizes now, if he can't. Because Nada can.

Her smile is his.


End file.
